THE STRUGGLE FOR WOMAN SUFFRAGE: EARLY TACTICS
The struggle for women’s civil and economic rights,
including woman suffrage, was one of the major movements of the 19th
and early 20th centuries in the United States. New Jersey
women and men were in the forefront of this movement. After the Civil
War, when it became clear that the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the
United State Constitution would not enfranchise women as it did African
American men, woman suffrage advocates became alarmed. New Jersey women
were among the first to take action. Though suffragists were criticized
as extremists, they organized at the local, county and state levels,
they spoke out publicly, they published tracts and broadsides, they
petitioned governmental bodies, they worked for sympathetic political
candidates, and they engaged in various types of public protest.
New Jersey Women’s Unique Position. New Jersey
women rallied around the fact that they once were allowed to vote and
had this right taken away. How had this come about? The first
constitution of the state, the New
Jersey Constitution of 1776, (Article IV) gave all inhabitants worth
fifty pounds the right to vote, without reference to gender or race. New
Jersey women were the only women in the nation with this right and some
of them were known to have voted in several elections until their voting
rights, and those of African Americans, were stripped from them. In 1807
the New Jersey Legislature passed "An
Act to regulate the election of members of the legislative council and
general assembly, sheriffs and coroners in this state". that
did away with property requirements but limited the vote to white men.
Later white male suffrage was written into the revised New
Jersey Constitution of 1844 (Article II).
The Beginnings of the Suffrage Movement. In 1867
and 1868, the woman suffrage movement in the United States was in its
infancy. The 37 states were recovering from Civil War and reformers were
committed to expanding the civil rights of those who had been left out
of the political process.
Lucy Stone of Orange, a nationally-known reformer and orator,
took the lead in the struggle by speaking before the New Jersey
legislature on March 6, 1867, advocating the vote for women and African
Americans. That spring she traveled with her husband, Henry Blackwell,
throughout Kansas to advocate the passage of a similar state referendum
there. Later that year the suffrage movement in New Jersey was
launched.
